Diet... food... nutrition

Bright Eyes' nutrition is high on my mind at the moment, following a great little public presentation by our homeopath on the 'Gut-Brain Connection'. I also happened to get out of our local library a book with this wonderful title: Happiness is a regular and full bowel movement, which focuses on many of the same ideas.

Digestion and nutrition affect the blood which affect the brain. This gut-brain connection is not widely known about or discussed as general knowledge in our society these days. We know we should 'eat healthily' but we grin naughtily and slap ourselves on the wrist when we don't. Eating well is a sort of optional extra in our minds.

We don't realise that for some people, eating right makes the difference between having brain fog all day or being able to think. Eating is for living, not living for eating.

What came out of the seminar is this.

Bright Eyes needs:
probiotics, fermented foods, good oils and fats, fruit and vegies and regular protein meals.

He needs to get rid of:
sugar, processed foods, gluten and casein (wheat and milk), artificial everything, chemicals and bad fats (I'm not talking about saturated animal fats, but trans-fats like margarine, vegetable oils that have been processed and oils that have been overheated so that they have free radicals in them).

It sounds great, and I am so truly convinced of all of it that every meal time and snack time I feel hugely guilty. The fact remains that he won't eat good stuff. He won't eat meat except for his own brand of sausages. He refuses vegetables and eggs and fish. He loves sugar and chips and lollies and hates yoghurt.

A doctor who wrote a book about all of this said that you can teach children to eat things. She put her autistic son's video on for 10 minutes and then turned it off and said "You can have it back on when you eat this pea."

Apparently it took forever, but he ate the pea. Am I willing to go through these sorts of agonies? I just don't know.